No new physics — yet

World's largest collider finds nothing to match odd results from its nearest rival

After the two most powerful particle colliders in the world went toe-to-toe July 22 at the Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics in Grenoble, France, the result was a technical knockout.

New data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva delivered a serious blow to hints of unusual new physics coming out of the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. With 70 trillion collisions under its belt, the LHC has so far been a stalwart defender of the standard model, the reigning theory of particle physics.

“We’re learning that the standard model is very hard to kill,” says Pierluigi Campana, spokesperson for the LHCb detector team.

Researchers at the Tevatron’s collider detector at Fermilab, or CDF, had reported the first signs of a rare decay in a paper posted online July 12 at arXiv.org. Particles called Bs mesons seemed to be disintegrating into a muon (a cousin of the electron) and an a

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